The "catch"

"On the Internet, no one knows your a dog" goes the saying - proving your a human on the net is becoming more and more common.

marketing

Accessing applications such as GMail and Twitter normally involves typing a series of letters and numbers called a 'catchpa' to validate access is indeed by a human ... and not a dog or computer system which can open the system for abuse, such as spamming.

technology

The term Catchpa was first introduced back in 2000 to describe a test that can differentiate humans from computers under the following conditions :

Easily solved by humans
Easily generated and evaluated but
Not easily solved by computers

Trouble with catchpa's is they tend to be rather complicated and irrelevant - however they by there very nature command our attention due to our desire to access the services they protect. Attention advertisers are keen to exploit but are finding harder and harder to command.

Your attention

There is also a balance here, how to make the whole experience such that this whole process does not drive away users from your site.

onehandshakeblogspot.com

A neat solution from solve media uses advertisers messages as the catchpa's - moving these brand messages to a point where our attention is high and is likely to have more impact.

The results seem impressive with Solve Media citing 1200% increase in brand recollection over traditional banner ad's, however just how long term would be should everyone adopt this approach is open to debate

Solve Media : click

Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving Services in an economic context : click

Where's Wally?

With most hand-held devices now being shipped with GPS capabilities and the launch of Facebook places sharing your whereabouts has never been easier.

Not all of us want to continually broadcast, so how do you control what and when you display ( if at all ) your location information?

Changing the settings from within the application to display just city level information rather than more detailed location is laborious, even more so on a hand-held device.

Research by Lukasz Jedrzejczyk aims to make this far simpler by using the 'shake' motion of the phone to determine the level of information that is shared. For example ' up and down ' would share the users location to everyone, moving the phone away from the body would just share city info.

To ensure the phone is not activated by day to day moments ( such as jogging ) the software is activated by a dynamic movement - once activated the software can then recognise the preceding actions and set the privacy controls accordingly.

paper can be found here : click

Outdoor - Relevance

Comparisons to the "Minority report" scene of targeted advertising have surfaced again with IBM's claim to be working on combining RFID technology and outdoor advertising.

The well quoted scene involves the star of the movie being prompted by offers and advertising based on his current mood and preferences - true relevance.

Three years ago a friend blogged of a trial in the US with Mini, using keyfobs which were encoded RFID tags this information was used to then display messages on interactive billboards as you drove around the city. This caught my eye as being a neat way of engaging with consumers, albeit in a limited fashion which was specific to the brand.

The rub

marketing

Identifying users is only part of the challenge - understanding their actual needs and desires at that particular point in time is a different matter all together. Quite how IBM proposes to accumulate the required data from each of us in order to fuel the decision engine that will eventually drive this advertising will be interesting.

RFID is being pushed on a number of fronts around contactless payments in credit cards with Barclaycard and Ericsson making statements that they are to incorporate the chips in future phones, so actual devices in the wild should be enough to make this viable in the near term.

marketing

So with these devices creating transaction information and history this is ready source of information that could be leveraged to drive such systems - but it this really viable?

Will we the consumer allow this valuable information to be used in such a public space to drive offers and advertising.

Or will we have to revert to completing profile's which would then be used to filter and drive such content - very tedious.....

So while we have to consider dwell times and exactly how to advertise to many people in close proximity, the challenge of profiling and exactly how and what data can be leveraged remains the key hurdle in all of this - not the ability to electronically detect a tag.

update : Electronic Outdoor Ads use cameras to determine gender and age of passer by.

Data Breach - what are the costs ?

The Ponemon Institute’s annual benchmark study examines the costs organizations incur when responding to data breach incidents resulting in the loss or theft of protected personal information.

It's resent survey encompassed 31 companies who had suffered data breach , the results are not hypothetical – they represent cost estimates for activities resulting from an actual data loss incident

In the report the number of individual records breached ranged from 2,500 records to 263,000, which considering the scale of some recent public admissions ( Bank of America, UPS loss of Citibank data backup and the infamous Choice Point selling of customer information to criminals ) is small fry.

The study concludes the average cost of a data breach to the company involved ( excluding regulatory fines ) is $182 PER RECORD - if you include regulatory fines this number is off the scale ( Choicepoint landed a $15 million penalty).

Personal data being stored and used electronically is increasing - without diligence and control, so are the risks.